This week’s Sunday Rewind goes back to last year’s London #mtpcon and a talk from veteran product manager Itamar Gilad on evidence-guided product development.
Itamar explains that evidence-guided development can result in more reliable and repeatable decisions that empower teams to deliver greater value.
He reflects on changes he’s seen in software development over the past 20 years. Today, agile teams may launch multiple times a day, but 20 years ago waterfall development meant “launching maybe three times a year”. Now, design and user data research are a part of the product and common across companies of all sizes but 20 years ago, these assets were exclusive to the richest companies. What hasn’t changed, he says, are the fundamental product decision-making practices, specifically deciding what teams should build.
Evidence-guided development has given teams the ability to do research with powerful tools for data analytics and data science, Itamar says. He mentions the GIST framework which allows teams to empower their decision making.
He then talks about value-modelling, which relies on a single key business optimisation metric that the business can focus on, and about ways to evaluate ideas quickly and objectively. He recommends the ICE scoring model, which allows teams to reduce and prioritise ideas by multiplying 3 numerical values assigned to impact confidence and ease.
Itamar then talks about a tool he’s developed, the Confidence Meter, which he says allows teams to assess ideas strategically and repeatedly based on the type of analysis and supporting evidence they have.
With evidence-guided development, everyone, regardless of role, can be grouped and tasked as part of projects to experiment and analyse data, Itamar says. “It’s not just coding and designing, it’s actually making the learning happen. So we kind of convert our developers into researchers, into discoverers in a sense.”
Watch the original talk: From opinion-based to evidence-guided product development by Itamar Gilad
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